I try to stay away from the news these days. The lies and lying really get to me.

Speaking of lying, there was a t.v. series called Lie To Me, starring actor Tim Roth, a while back. He played an expert in reading body language and facial expressions, who was brought in to solve a crime or mystery when something really bad had happened. Roth figured out who the bad guy was by interviewing people and following out those kinds of facial and postural clues. It was an interesting show; particularly because in explaining how various body and facial tics indicated lies, photos of various real politicians’ faces (when they were being interviewed, questioned, or just speaking) were used in illustration. My God but our leaders are brazen and mendacious.

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Having mentioned actor Tim Roth, I want to say that he starred in one of the best movies I’ve ever seen . . . and that no one has ever heard of. I found it by accident surfing channels late one night. It’s titled “The Legend of 1900” and, as I said, nobody has ever heard of it. But it’s a GREAT movie. It’s about a piano-playing prodigy who is born in the year 1900; it’s basically a romance, but without any actual romance — and with a cameo by actress Melanie Thiéry, who is one of the three most achingly beautiful females who have kept their clothes on that I’ve ever seen on a screen.

The musical high point of the film is a sequence in which the famous Jelly Roll Morton (“the Father of Jazz”) challenges the Tim Roth character to a public piano-duel. That sequence is to die for. Give yourself a treat some evening and watch this gem.

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On a different level entirely, I want to show you an image of my “Diospyros” guitar. Diospyros is the generic name for ebony, and this guitar is made up of lots of ebony tiles mixed in with contrasting tiles of Yellowheart wood. Overall, the pattern looks a bit like all the Midwest farmland that one flies over and sees if one looks out of the airplane window; or, on a different scale, a stylized version of the fitted-together-cobblestone streets one finds in Mexican towns.

This guitar was, in fact, inspired by exactly that: the appealingly geometric look of the fitted-together cobblestones one can see on Mexican streets.

There’s a bit of a story behind this, of course. Part of that story has to do with how I notice, and get distracted by, the visuals in the world around me. I notice patterns, colors, textures, proportions, disproportions, continuities and discontinuities of line, evenness and unevenness, and all kinds of beauty in things no one else seems to notice. Textural stuff REALLY grabs my eye. This propensity really gets in my way when I’m trying to get anything done; so I try to hide when I’m working so as to get away from interruptions. Interruptions REALLY kill my focus and concentration.

Anyway, I was in a relationship with a woman some years ago. As I was married at the time it was, technically, an adulterous relationship — although my wife knew about it and really didn’t care. The marriage had, how should I put it, passed its “discard after . . . “ date.

This lady and I went to Puerto Vallarta for a week’s . . . uh . . . romantic getaway. Puerto Vallarta has long ago been converted into a tourist trap and is not nearly so pleasant a place in which to spend time as the travel industry might want you to think. The tourist hotels are about a mile out of town and isolated from the riff-raff. Those resort buildings are magnificent, impressively large, and soulless. They also jettison an awful lot of sewage directly into the ocean, not far from the town. Charming, that.

Puerto Vallarta is picturesque but has the scuffed and worn look of something that’s fallen on hard times. It’s right on the ocean; but the beach sand itself is a shockingly narrow strip . . . and it’s brown and looks dirty; it looks like a brown sugar truck had a major spill there. (The tourist hotels, in contrast, had imported tons of white sand that really does look nice, although the overall effect is that of an incongruous patch of white off in the distance, in the middle of an otherwise brown landscape.)

The main industry in the town is tourism, of course: the stores, restaurants, tours, crafts objects and imported merchandise, street vendors, etc. are all geared to that. (The crowning touch is that in order for the government to protect its tourist income, Puerto Vallarta is policed by soldiers from a nearby army facility who are armed not with pistols and rifles, but with machine guns.)

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It was during this romantic getaway that I found out that I didn’t really like the woman I was with. She was . . . well, let’s just say that we were appallingly mismatched. It was sort of like going on a romantic hideaway trip and discovering that your partner is a transvestite.

This lady was smart, attractive, and, among other things, a competitive scrabble player. For months, she beat me every time we played. I didn’t really mind; I like words and playing with words, and I didn’t have anything riding on whether I won or lost. And, in any event, the more we played the better I got and the closer the gap between our scores became. We took the scrabble set down to Puerto Vallarta and it was while we were down there that I beat her at scrabble for the first time. MAN, WAS SHE PISSED! Outraged, in fact. And she had a major tantrum. Such . . . uh . . . misbehavior for such a seemingly trivial reason . . . well, it was pivotal for me. The relationship went quickly downhill after that.

In any event, after that tantrum, rather than to hang out with her, I walked around Puerto Vallarta a lot. As I walked, I noticed beautiful visual patterns and textures everywhere. I hadn’t quite realized until that week how much these things impinge on me; but IT WAS VERY PLEASANT for me to simply walk around and see the sights. I looked at wrought iron work on the houses, the colors of the buildings, the cobblestoned streets, iguanas for sale, etc. I learned a bit about Puerto Vallarta itself, too.

For instance: there are insect in that region that live in hidey-holes at the bottoms of small craters that they make in the dirt; if you go out of town you’ll see lots of these little conical craters in the soil. These “V”-sided craters are about the size of a walnut, and their sloped sides are lined with VERY FINE sand. Being fine sand, these craters are a lighter color than the surrounding dirt, and are therefore not hard to find; but of course insects don’t care about color. Anyway, when another insect walks into one of these conical depressions the sand all around is so fine that it cannot get its footing and it slides down to the bottom of the dip; then the insect jumps out of its hole, grabs the unsuspecting victim, and eats it. This predator is called a “Lolita” by the locals, by the way.

Who knew Puerto Vallartans were so literate? Anyway, it was fun to look and learn.

Fast-forward some years. I came into possession of a coffee-table book titled ARTEFACTOS, which has lots of photographs of arts and crafts artifacts from Latin America. One of the photos was of a beautiful cobblestones street of the kind I’d seen in Puerto Vallarta, where squarish and rectangular-ish stones (rather than more rounded or oval ones) were fitted together. Wow. That image just jumped out at me. And I filed that away as something that I could do something with at some point.

Fast-forward a few more years to when I had a hankering to make a guitar for myself — for no other reason than that I wanted to do something different from all the usual stuff. Enter the idea for the Diospyros guitar. The attached image is of this instrument.

I have to tell you that carrying this project out was VERY time consuming . . . but I didn’t really mind. Just like losing at scrabble. I was chasing something new simply because I really wanted to do it. And I could. And eventually the Diospyros guitar was completed.

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The thing of it is: it probably never would have been made had I not disliked that girlfriend as much as I did and stumbled on the otherwise invisible beauties of Puerto Vallarta. (I mean, who ever goes anywhere to look at pavement?) I have to tell you that in a weird way I feel indebted to her; the Diospyros came about, in part, with her unwitting help. I have more than once been struck by a philosophical sense of how an irritant can ultimately become a pearl.

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Speaking of “philosophical”, I had a Mondegreen experience with that word some years ago. A Mondegreen is a mishearing of a lyric or poetic line in which one imagines that something quite different has been said.

The Mondegreen originates from a Scottish ballad where the hero of the narrative is slain . . . “ and . . . [they] laid him on the green”. Someone heard that as “. . . and Lady Mondegreen” instead . . . and thus Mondegreens were born.

Anyway, when I was in High School there was a popular Harry Belafonte song called “Island in the Sun”. It’s a Caribbean tune that goes:

This is my island in the sun

Where my people have toiled since time begun

Though I may sail on many a sea

Its shores will always be home to me

Oh island in the sun

Hailed to me by my father’s hand

All my days I will sing in praise

Of your forests, your waters, and shining sand . . . etc. etc.

The song goes on to the phrase “. . . and Calypso songs philosophical . . .” And that’s when I Mondegreened. I thought Belafonte was singing “Calypso songs full of Soffy Cal”. I couldn’t figure out what Soffy Cal was. For years I thought it might be some exotic Caribbean substance.

O.K. I’ll clam up about that now. It’s just getting too nacreous and chatoyant around here.

Someone asked about why I don’t post photos of current builds, comments, updates, etc. on the lutherie discussion forums. Well, there are several reasons. Mostly, I just don’t have the time.

I think that the Acoustic Guitar Forum is mostly a good thing; it gives individuals a chance to show off their latest work and get comments and information and support. I particularly am impressed by the postings such as one that I saw by JESSUPE (Jessupe Goldastini). What a painstakingly original and unique piece of work he’s accomplished! I have myselfposted my thoughts on various internet sites in the past. I did quite a bit of this some years ago on the ANZLF (Autralia/ New Zealand Luthier’s Forum), as well as on this one, and on a third one the name of which I’ve forgotten. These were mostly good experiences. But spending time on internet forums at this point in my life is not really for me; they can really soak one’s time up. And, frankly, not everyone behaves well.

Aside from all that, I have put everything I know and think about how guitars function, into my two books. My information is all there. Really: I’ve kept very little back except the specific thicknesses of my guitar woods. This is largely because there is no specific target thickness: each guitar top is a bit different in thickness. This is itself because I’m going for a specific stiffnessevery time, not a thickness. Each piece of wood is a little bit different, and it’s meaningless to give one number that would include tops for Jumbo guitars, and OM guitars, and OO guitars, and everything in between . . . that would furthermore include no information at all about bracing, string gauge, scale length, voicing procedures, doming, selective thinning within the same top, and the specifics of wood selection. PLUS: there are by now fully two dozen HOW-TO books that will give one or another specific number for top thickness. So the best I could do is to give an average thickness.

GOOD VS. BAD TEACHING

I produced a DVD a few years ago of a lecture that I gave in which I listed and explained the factors that are responsible for a guitar’s sound: voicing work, bracing, materials stiffness, and vibrating modes of guitar tops. I laid out everything that I’ve discovered and use that I consider important. I even brought some guitar bodies that had been voiced to different degrees of completion, and tapped on their tops to illustrate the progression of tap tones in my voicing work. Such tap tones audibly reveal how a guitar top “opens up”, and I find them indispensable as guides.

At the end, when the audience was asking questions, someone asked if they could see the final shapes of my bracing (that was producing those tones that had reflected my voicing efforts). I responded that he’d have to take my voicing class to see that level of the work. That may have been a mistake, and I got some blowback from it as the word spread that I was stingy and secretive with my work. I regret having sounded so flip and glib. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to have said the following — or something like it:

“I’ve described every principle and consideration that I find important in dealing with guitar sound: wood stiffness in guitars, optimal bracing, top vibrational motions, torque and string pull, an evenness of the vibrating gradient, the Cube Rule of stiffness, guitars as projectors and as diffusers, and top doming. [NOTE: this stuff is all in my books.] I’ve told you what I think, and why I think it, and I used visual aids and diagrams. I’ve talked about how I came to discover these important things, and even what mistakes I made along the way. And, mainly, these are precisely the factors that I work with as I make guitars the sounds of which everyone likes. Now, if I just show you the shapes and profiles of my bracing . . . youwillimmediatelyforgeteverythingIsaidandgohomeand copywhatyou’veseenmedo. And that, in my opinion, is really bad teaching”.

I said above that it may have been a mistake for me to refuse to show my final configuration of voiced bracing to the audience member who asked to see it. That’s half of it. The other half is: Are you kidding me?; you expect me to show you what it’s taken me four decades to figure out, just for the asking — and then criticize me when I say no? Pal, I just told you ALL the things that I think about in order to do the work that I do. I owe you that because I promised to speak about these things. But I draw the line there; that SPECIFIC stuff is entirely proprietary. I do not owe you to show you the specific fruits of forty-plus years of my learning curve just because you’ve bought a $10 ticket to a presentation I’m making.

I wish to be a cheering section for the honing of one’s own thinking skills. Also, I know something important that a lot of younger people don’t: things acquired without effort or equitable exchange — sort of like sex on demand — have no significance. You can stop reading now, by the way; I will post further postings on this matter but they are merely additional commentary.

Hi again. I want to repeat that you don’t have to read all this stuff. Or, if you do, try to pace yourself. And if you find this material interesting it’s perfectly all right with me if you share it, or part of it, with your friends. Or not.

I’ve been rambling on about maleness and femaleness. I think that ideas of maleness and femaleness are as deeply hardwired into our language as they are hardwired into our minds. As I suggested, it seems that the very word “environment” reeks of maleness. At least, that’s how it seems to have started out; these days there’s a bit of an ecological spin to it.

Ditto “patriotism”, which word is much on the political forefront these days, if only in the negative. The thing about both “patriotism” and “environment” is that they are such fundamental ideas that it never occurs to anyone to question them or see how they fit into the scheme of things. Instead, people consider that the scheme of things fits into them: they are that basic. Yet both are man-created concepts, and both of them seemingly trace back to maleness. “Patriotism” comes from the root-word “pater”, meaning “father”. Patriotism = loyalty to the fatherland. That root also gives us a whole slew of other words that begin with “pater” or “patr”. Many of them are pretty arcane, but we still use “patriot”, “patrician”, “patrimony”, “patriarchal”, and “paternity test” in everyday discourse. We also “patronize” people.

In view of that root, what’s the deal with naming a woman “Patricia”? Also, Athena was the Patron Goddess of Athens and the Patroness of the Arts. Read up on Athena; those words are used. But aren’t these all examples of those . . . uh . . . oxygenated moron things?

Given the discouragement that people feel with both the world and with government in general, I’d offer a gentler alternative to the forced, self-serving, ugly, and debauched version of Patriotism that people are rabidly claiming for themselves and/or hysterically accusing others of lacking or betraying. Become a Matriot. Believe in the gentler, healthier, and more nourishing principles. “Matriot”, of course, comes from the word “mater”, or “mother”.

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton, the most hated female of our generation. It’s true. People HATE her. I was listening to an interview with author Amy Chozick, who has just released a book about Ms. Clinton. Ms. Chozick has put a lot of research and work into her book and ran plentifully into people’s attitude that, well, a woman might be a good president . . . but not that one. Anyone but her! A lot of people, women included, have a visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps you are one such person.

Interestingly, and disturbingly, many people can give no reason for their hatred when asked; they just are adamant in their kneejerk revulsion of her. Pointing out that such irrationally held opinions are not based in anything real, or documented, or even dispassionately looked at does not seem to help. Fact-checking is lost on them. Hillary is literally the most investigated and accused-of-malfeasance person of our generation and no one has ever found anything to charge her with nor found her to be culpable ofexcept being stiff and unspontaneous. Well, Trump did once comment (on national television) that Hillary urinates, and he labeled her as being disgusting for doing so. So there’s that. The fact that Trump has such feelings about bathroom breaks is the surest proof that neither Melania nor Ivanka ever urinate. He couldn’t stand it if they did. But it’s very odd that he didn’t comment on those Russian prostitutes . . .

I’ve had some conversations of my own with people about these matters, and while I haven’t come away with any greater clarity I do sense that these are still hot topics a year after the election. People are very frustrated with both Hillary and the Democratic establishment. Interestingly, to me, almost all the conversations I’ve had were ones in which I was told whom to blame for the mishandlings of Hillary’s presidential campaign. Or commenting on Hillary’s various failings as Secretary of State. As though the whole thing was a massive tactical error on someone’s part . . . and without commenting on the incredible peccadillos of the opposition, the big picture, context, political history, Trump’s political track record of minus zero, etc.

Notice that I’m not saying this or that party is right or wrong; to even try to go there will inflame the situation further. I’m commenting on how polarized the matter is.

That is soooo weird and troubling.

You might ask from where do the Republicans get their ideas that Hillary is crooked, traitorous, dishonest, untrustworthy, repellent, and/or criminal? In my next newsletter, a doctor with a flashlight will show us exactly where those ideas come from.

I learned a new word the other day: androcracy (pronounced an-DROK-ruh-see). It means a system ruled by men.

Androcracy indeed; we’re all familiar with that. “Andro” is the Greek root for “male” or “maleness”; the Latin root is “vir”, as in “virile”. I’m under the impression that the Greeks also used “vir”, however, so I’m a bit confused on this point: Socrates’ wife Xantippe was famously a sharp-tongued scold and nag, and she was referred to as a “virago”.

Well, I suspect she had reason to be. Her hubby seems to have been gone all the time, talking philosophy all day long with other men, and in general building up his resumé as a great thinker. But not being a hubby. From everything I’ve ever read, he ignored his wife; he basically fled from her. He didn’t work as far as I know, and I don’t know what he could have brought home money-wise to make his wife happy (my guess is that he owned land and lived off his rents). As far as I know there’s never been any mention of whether he had children, although he probably did. Somehow, I doubt that Xantippe started out as a virago. Well, to the best of my knowledge domesticity was not a priority of any sort in Greek society; what was a priority was the polis, or community. At least, it was so among the citizens.

Well, certainly the male citizens; slaves and foreigners (called “exenos” in Greek, from which we get the word “xenophobia”) didn’t count. On top of that, in those days, women weren’t only not part of the social or political picture, but once they married they weren’t part of any picture at all — except maybe in mythology. They became invisible. At least, that’s what historians have concluded from the remaining writings, folklore, statuary, stories, etc. about Greek daily culture. Greek daily culture, as far as any extant literature or records show, was very male-centered. As a matter of fact men loved and adored each other in ways that would be viewed as very suspicious by some moderns.

There may have been heterosexual domestic life aplenty, but that’s the kind of thing that is so ordinary that no one ever puts any of it down on paper. At some future time archaeologists may be trying to decipher the American sense of normal domesticity by referring to surviving historical documents like our Tabloids’ reports on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s marriage, novels by the likes of Ayn Rand and Norman Mailer, media fare such as Divorce Court and Judge Judy, and things that Donald Trump and Woody Allen said.

“Virility” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “the period in life during which a person of the male sex is in his prime; mature or fully developed manhood or male vigor; power of procreation; male sexual potency; strength and vigor of action or thought”. Hmmmmm. I guess women must not have any of those attributes, urges, or capacities. Not if the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t say so, and it doesn’t mention women at all as far as this kind of thing goes. So I guess there’s no doubt about it: virility is entirely a guy thing. Interestingly, I haven’t run across any female version of this word. There’s “chastity”, which is a behavior solely attached to women who aren’t fully developed in their womanhood nor frisky in the procreative department. Its male counterpart is “celibacy”, which is sort of an anti-virility stance. But there’s no female counterpart to “virility” that doesn’t border on sluttiness, at least that I know of. Women aren’t supposed to want to fuck. Surely Stormy Daniels is an aberration. Of course, perhaps she doesn’t want to be a sex object but merely does it because it pays the bills. You know, like most people’s jobs.

I’m sure that the word “virgin” — which of course means a woman who has not yet had sexual relations — connects in some way to the “vir = maleness” trope. I mean, they seem to have the same root. The Latin root for “virgin” is supposedly “virgo” or “virge”, but Virgo is also the name of a constellation; and that word is really not all that different from the Latin root for “male”. Hmmmm. “Virgo/vir” might be something like the similarity between the words “male”/“(fe)male”?

Even Spanish has this odd similarity: “hombre” and “hembra”.

How come they couldn’t come up with different words for genders that everybody since the beginning of time has agreed are not the same thing at all and perhaps not even from the same planet?

Maybe “virgin” was originally something like “vir + gen“, or “vir + gyne”, indicating that the male essence, when added to the primordial female essence, would start a process to bring some other essence into life and being. “Gen” is, after all, the root word for beginnings, growth, creating things, procreation, starting things, giving life, and of course generating things.

On another level (in medicine) we have mutagens, things that start mutations. Androgensare chemicals that stimulate maleness. Organisms in which gender is not easily identified as being either male or female are androgynous (i.e., male/female). And, more recently, there is the genome . . . the blueprint that everything starts from or begins with.

“Virtue” doesn’t exactly mean “manliness”, but it does mean something like it. VIRTue, VIRTual, VIRTuous and other words in which there is a “T” after the “VIR” come from a different root: virtus, meaning excellence, position,or link. The Oxford English Dictionary devotes almost an entire column to the many meanings and attributes of “virtue”, so it can mean lots of things. Two of them, however, are “chastity or purity on the part of a woman” and “the display of manly qualities”. So I think we’re still in the same polarized male/female ballpark here.

Getting back to plain old vir: “triumvirate” means ” the rule by/of three men”. Ergo, virology must be the study of men and maleness, no?

Well, actually, no. That word, and alsovirus and virulent, seem to descend from the root “virulentus”, which means “poison” or “poisonous”. It’s very suspicious to me that the roots of “man” and “poison” are so similar. Once again, couldn’t they find some other word that actually sounded different???

We’ve never had a triumgynate. We’ve never even had a gynate of any sort. We’ve only had gynecologists . . . who have virtually (there’s that pesky “T” again) all been men. Go figure. It does help to explain why the Greek Myths don’t mention the story of Gynocles and the Lion, or Androcles and the Lioness. Still, everything comes from Mothers, so my mind wants to play with the word origin (origynmakes more sense to me thanorigen).

Well, mothers indeed: everything does come from them and out of them. The root word for “mother” is mater . . . as in maternal, maternity, alma mater, matricide, matrimony, matrilineal, matrix, etc. I don’t think the word “mattress” comes from that root, though. “Mater” gives us the word material. “Material” is that out of which everything comes. Everything is made out of, or comes out of, material. Everything does really come out of the mother. Likewise, the matrix also has mother-like characteristics. It is that which holds and contains everything, and within which everything exists, and out from which things come.

Getting back to vir, I wonder if, somehow, the environment secretly refers to . . . all the men around us? Or all the maleness around us? How arrogant is that? Yet, there must be something to it. In ancient Greece once a woman was married the world hardly ever saw her again. Men did see prostitutes (the Greek word for which was “porne” by the way, from which we get pornography) out in the open – although certainly not in public places where The Men congregated to see and be seen, to be men of affairs, to discuss the matters of the world, do business, participate in the affairs of the community, vote, hang out and network, gossip and socialize, talk of poetry and war, hear the latest news, etc. I’m pretty sure that the agora (the open public space in the community) was an all-male environment – as was, as I mentioned, most of the remaining literature and whatever historical record that has survived from those times and that culture. (I suspect that Greek women were agoraphobic in the contemporary feminist meaning of the word.)

I mentioned that the focus of Greek socio-political thought was the polis, the community. It was the adult Greek male’s responsibility to participate in community events (for a fuller account of this, read some Edith Hamilton or H.D.F. Kitto). Polis gives us the words “political”, “policy”, and “metropolis”, and maybe even “polite” and “police”. Those citizens who kept to themselves and did not participate in the affairs of the community were called idiots. That’s where the word comes from. Idiot comes from the root idio, which means by itself or from itself. An idiot was someone who kept to themselves and didn’t participate in the community’s social, political, military, and economic affairs and culture. It’s the same root as in the words idiopathic and idiosyncratic – which describe a condition or phenomenon that is its own, that arises out of itself, and is not connected to a prior cause. Idiom, too; an idiom is some figure of speech or phrase that came about by itself by way of grammatical accident or convenience, but without being beholden or connected to, or deriving from, other words, roots, or common speech. “Idiotic”, likewise, bespeaks of: “man, you’re on your own on that one; no one else is on board with it or is even going anywhere near it. That’s all yours”.

Finally, does it not seem to you that, in a way, matrix is just as apt a word as environment is? They both refer to the . . . uh . . . vessel, membrane, or context that contains and holds everything — both literally and metaphorically. Except that it is a female/feminine counterpart to “environment”. The fact is that we exist in the Matrix of the world just as much as we exist in an Environment. Well, I think there must be some very good reason why the word patrix does not exist. Anybody out there agree with me? Do I see any raised hands? Hello? Anybody there?

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS (NOTE: YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS PART; IT’S RATHER A DOWNER)

Hi:

As I said, these are new thoughts for me, and I’m still mulling them over. It’s . . . complicated. It’s even more complicated than that. Yet I think that these are accurate assessments. I also think that the things I’m describing will be my most important legacy. My guitars will be sought and bought and sold at high prices, and many people will make more money off them than I ever have. And maybe some day someone will write a book about me.

But the air will be foul; the water will be putrid; the oceans will be dead and full of plastic (there is reputedly an “island” of plastic the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean; currents have carried the waste from many nations there). Most of the species of animals [we don’t actually know how many there are; new ones are being discovered all the time even now] will be gone; Nature’s food chain will have been COMPLETELY disrupted; the rivers and the land will be polluted. Shame on us.

I can hear some of you thinking, oh, come off it; sure that’s all a little bit true; but it’s not ALL true.Don’t be such a bleeding heart. Well . . . I think that a little bit of any or all of this is way too much. It’s not really what I signed on for. Or, you might also be thinking, oh stop being such a purist; everybodyandevery country that candoes things like that. Hmmmmm. Is this helpful?

See, the thing is, I actually think about this stuff.

I quipped in my last posting “that if Trump and Kim Jung Un don’t destroy us first”. This is a thought that I find utterly horrifying . . . and possible. Trump himself, before he ran for office, was described in one of the New York magazines as being “a wounded monster”. That he is. He’s a psychopath and a narcissist. I don’t know what Kim Jung Un is, but he’s scary too.

Let me explain what the above terms mean. The DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) is the Bible of the mental health field; it contains the diagnoses, and language that can be used to describe the inner workings of someone who has come to attention of the mental health network. When I was in grad school studying clinical psych we were on DSM III-R (Third version, Revised). That got replaced by DSM IV; and we’re currently using DSM-V. The diagnoses and categories of mental abnormality have shifted; for instance, homosexuality was classified as a mental disease in DSM-I. That has changed, of course.

In DSM-III-R sociopaths and psychopaths were considered to be different categories. The difference was that a sociopath would lie, cheat, manipulate, charm, and worm his way to getting what he (or she) wanted. The psychopath would feel no compunction about harming you to get what he wanted, if you stood in his way. In DSM-V these categories have been blended into a single one, with the sociopaths and the psychopaths simply being on different parts of a spectrum that encompassed all such personalities.

While Republicans may disagree with this it is clear that Mr. Trump lies, has no interest in nor skills in governing, has no conscience or impulse control, is pathologically thin-skinned, and is vindictive and malicious. And dangerous. He frightens me; he’s essentially no different from Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Joe McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, or Putin.

Equally troubling is that no one in the media seems horrified. They just keep on reporting on business as usual, while the comedians keep getting paid for mocking plentifully but impotently.

This all leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. So I’ll tell a joke of sorts.

A company CEO is dealing with taxes at year’s end, and tells his accountant to prepare the necessary paperwork. The accountant spends two weeks getting all the numbers together and delivers them to the boss, and says that it’s all there except for a $200 discrepancy that can’t be accounted for.

The boss says to go back over the figures and find the source of the error. The accountant goes back to work to look through the numbers, receipts, bills, invoices, payroll records, etc. again.

A week later he reports back to the boss, saying that he can’t find the reason for the discrepancy. He says, “Boss, I don’t get it. You’re paying me a lot more than $200 to find this thing. This company makes more than a million dollars a year. So what’s the big deal about this $200?”

The boss says, “well . . . I know we make more than a million dollars a year . . . but the truth is that I don’t really understand a million dollars. But two hundred dollars: THAT I understand!”

Ecce Trump. He doesn’t understand the job he got voted into his office for. But an eight-year-old schoolgirl criticizing him? THAT he understands.

I grew up in Mexico. I remember being in a park one day, when I was young. I had to go to the rest-room building. When I got there I saw that, like many construction projects in Mexico, this one had not been completed: it was a large bare room without toilets or sinks or toilet paper or any other bathroom paraphernalia . . . and the floor was completely covered with piles of human shit. People had found a bare spot, squatted down, and dumped their load. I didn’t make that mess; but when I listen to the news I feel like I have to go into a room like that. That’s sort of what I feel like these days. I didn’t go into that particular bathroom, by the way; I held it in.

I’m holding it in on different levels and in different ways, these days. And as I said, when I started out making guitars many years ago . . . I had no suspicion whatsoever of any of this ever being so.

Wow. If I were a real Buddhist I’d be in the present and not concern myself with this stuff.

I have been writing about selling guitars to China, and some reports on how China has been modernizing. I’m writing this narrative as I have been understanding it; I may be in error; but as far as I know I’m describing things as they are. And I was in the middle of the “you don’t have to read this part because it’s too disturbing” section. It certainly brings me down. But here’s the rest:

Global warming has also affected rainfall patterns in China, exacerbating a growing series of droughts. But while there is rain it washes over the mountains of waste I’d cited; it’s all junk that the U.S. can’t dispose of domestically. In China the water runoff from the heavy metals in the junk, the electronics, the wiring, the motherboards, the switches, the screens, etc. leaches into the ground. Runoff from rain as well as the low-tech washing, cleaning, processing, and reclaiming procedures used to salvage the gold from the gold-plating of parts, etc. plus the scavenging for other precious metals . . . has polluted the rivers in Southern China. The water is a horrible color. The water table has been poisoned so that the water for whole provinces is undrinkable; China is now importing water into its cities for the first time. As I said, all of this is occurring on a vast industrial scale.

It is indeed occurring so on many levels. “Racing to Extinction” is largely about exactly that, but from another point of view than being suffocated in discards. Part of it touches on the Chinese fishery industry. The most shocking footage I saw is of one of the largest shark fin processing plants in the world; it shows A VAST ACREAGE OF PILES OF SHARK FINS — mountains of fins of sharks that have been killed by the many tens of thousands (that month!) . . . and that could cover a football stadium several feet deep. It is all done wholesale, with no thought to depletion of the oceans. It is all part of the same effort that humanity — as exemplified by the Chinese fishing industry — is hell-bent toward.

I was horrified to see these documentaries, and horrified to see what the Chinese are doing. And feeling bad toward them. Until I realized that they’re basically boring holes in the bottom of the boat that we’re all in . . . and that we (the U.S.) are complicit in this. There are a lot of American companies who have set up branches in China, and a lot more are fixing to do so. China wants to keep these foreign merchants out, but I think they’ll find ways in.

O.K., YOU CAN START READING AGAIN

That’s about when I stopped being able to draw a line that separates “us” from “them” . . .

. . . and it started me asking where, exactly, do I fit into all this?

O.K., I’m the clever little luthier who is making beautiful guitars. Just what do my clients do to get the money with which to buy my guitars? Is it honest work? Are there shrewd thefts involved? You know, these are questions that one just doesn’t ask. Don’t even get me started on Banks . . . [except to ask: do you know where the word Bank comes from? Well, before Banks as we know them existed, moneylenders first practiced their trade during the expanding economic growth and activities of the Renaissance; money was needed for trade, for commerce, for wars, etc. The moneylenders were mostly Jews – by default, not genetic predisposition — because the Catholic Church forbade all Catholics from dealing with money; money was corrupting and evil. Anyway, before they moved into offices, moneylenders would set up in the town marketplace; they’d have their own spot just like any vegetable vendor, and they’d sit all day long on a little bench or stool that they brought with them, and do business with anyone who came along and needed their services. At the end of the day they lugged their benches home and counted their money, I guess. The Italian for bench or stool is “banco”, and when you wanted money you would go to “the banco”. So there.] And just what do the people whom they deal with do for the money that they pay my clients with so that they can pay me? The thing is . . . the fact is that I am dealing with people who are dealing with people who deal with people who deal with people who deal with people who deal with people . . . who are ruining our air, our water, our food, our relationships with our fellow man, our animals, our land, and our sense of being human. I have banked with Wells Fargo bank since 1972 – well before many of you reading this were born. This bank is not my friend; it is not your friend; it is not anybody’s friend. It is a criminal enterprise that has opened millions of accounts that their “owners” didn’t know about; and it funds projects that degrade the environment. Read the news. But is there a better bank for me to move my funds to? [SEE SIDEBAR, BELOW]

You, by the way, are dealing with the very same people.

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SIDEBAR

*** The difference between Savings and Loan Organizations and Commercial Banks used to be that the former were only allowed to loan out as much money as they had in deposits; the latter were allowed to loan out many times as much money as they had in deposits, under the fiction that the government would cover losses if the bank failed. This distinction is no longer in effect: S. & Ls (remember Charles Keating?) are now fully as dishonest as the banks are. How does that work? Well, besides helping to finance nefarious ventures that degrade the environment, and bilking millions of their customers as Wells Fargo was recently convicted of, and laundering money, etc. loaning out more money than you have is profitable (so long as the banks don’t all fail at the same time as they did in 1929) but it is inherently wrong. For one thing, it inflates and devaluates all currency. See, if the supply of goods is fixed, and the banks create six times the amount of buying power of the actual cash on hand (that’s what credit is, dude: buying power), then it’s the equivalent of having six times the amount of actual cash on hand . . . and prices will rise. Why wouldn’t they? Result: everybody’s money is worth less – except for those who don’t actually work for a living but make money by getting others to do the real work for them. One of any government’s proper functions is to ensure that there’s a balance between the amount of cash on hand and the amount of goods there are; it keeps prices stable. There’s a great Hugarian word: csibész (pronounced Chi’-base). Look it up.

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How is this something to not think about? And what is my relationship to it? Is my selling guitars into the Chinese market going to help or hinder? And how?

Well, these are non-questions, I fear. It’s a global phenomenon that I’m caught up in like a leaf in a river and that I have no influence whatsoever over. We’re all caught up in it. Even if I sold no guitars to any Chinese dealer, they (I’m sorry to resort to such clichés as “the Chinese”) will buy all the new and used Somogyi guitars that they can find from my dealers and/or private sellers, and Bob’s your uncle. I’m part of it regardless of whether I want to be or not; if not very much now, then certainly later.

I can almost hear you thinking, hey, wait a minute; the people you’re dealing with aren’t doing anything like that. What are you thinking? Well, as I said, the fact is that I’m already in the mix. We’re all already in the mix. How long has it been since you’ve purchased anything NOT made in China? As every Buddhist knows, I have no control over anything other than myself. Not only that but, as every psychologist knows, I also don’t have nearly as much control over myself as I want to think I have.

Ethical behavior is the only thing that makes sense to me. But it’s easier said than done.

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REFLECTIONS ON MY LIFE

It is interesting for me to contemplate all this at this point in my life. As you know, I have recently had a life-changing event, the significance of which is that I see that I am at the end of my career and my life. At least, relatively at the end. And because of this I have a new perspective from which to look back on my life as a whole . . . and to assess its significance, as well as to think about how I want to live the rest of my life. That realization is that I do not want to work six days a week as I’ve always done. I want time to think. I want time to relax. I want time to do art projects in wood. I don’t want to have to prove anything to anyone. I want to be happy, not just busy. And, largely, I don’t find the prospect of breaking into another new market all that exciting – even without the complications I alluded to above. Been there; done that; got a t-shirt full of sawdust, wood shavings, and sanding dust.

So, it’s seeming to me that the “significances” of my life are several. There are personal relationships, of course, and family. There is “growing up and being successful”. There’s the “being a good person” component. There is also the “being young and then growing old” one. Some people count the notches on their shillelagh or will have their final bank balance or College Board Scores carved on their tombstone. And there is also the “how do I fit into the world?” component; you know, the socio-economico-political-cultural-ethical one. Well, (if Trump and Kim-Jong-Un don’t destroy the world first, that is), I will have trained and taught a number of talented guitar makers who will be important and prominent in that world market. I will have made that possible.

When I was starting out, years ago, I couldn’t have imagined any of this happening.

I was describing the rumbling growth of the guitar market in Korea and China. You can’t have growth and economic bubbles without rich people’s gambling speculatively on the chance of getting even richer. It’s beginning to happen in China now; I don’t know what they want to call themselves politically, but their economy is Capitalism on steroids.

Socialism and Communism? Hah! No way, José.

China has already had one real estate bubble burst, and no doubt more things like that will happen because no one is doing anything to keep any of them from happening. It’s like what happened in our own bubble of 2008 in which several million people lost their homes because of the criminal depradations of our own Banking, Lending, and Home Mortgage institutions . . . and no one has ever been held accountable for it . . . and has been continuing since. We all know that those wily Orientals (shades of Earl Derr Biggers, Charlie Chan, and Fu Manchu!) are great at copying things. Well, they’re copying Capitalism with a vengeance.

Anyway, I am beginning to be invited into this new and growing market . . . which I think I’m managing to make sound quite distasteful. Dealers (who are attending the NAMM show I described earlier) are eagerly and hopefully approaching me and other luthiers like me . . . like . . . uh . . . like moths to a sock. In my case this is because I am prominent in the world of guitar making; they want to have my guitars because to carry merchandise from a prominent Western luthier will get them an edge with publicity and sales. I think they’d promote my guitars as being the best, exotic, expensive, superb, and almost magical . . . and will probably help cure baldness and impotence.

As part of this thrust, I’m being interviewed and filmed a lot these days. Part of this interest is coming from new Chinese guitar magazines (there’s even a Chinese edition of Fingerstyle magazine!). But also, as I’m part of the rapidly aging American lutherie community (and that includes makers of guitars, banjos, mandolins, violins, etc. etc.), I am being interviewed and filmed and recorded and being sent questionnaires by American institutions, museums, archives, etc. that want to preserve pertinent historical record.

I mean, once we’re dead we are no longer available to be interviewed and allowed to tell our stories. (Where were these people when I was younger and needed the attention???). Anyway, I’m spending more time than ever before receiving visitors who have these projects to carry out.

CHINESE GUITAR FACTORIES:

The Chinese market is very competitive. There are hundreds of guitar factories in Guangzhou, in Southern China. It’s a huge city that is made up entirely of factories and dormitories. They make EVERYTHING, including guitars.

I’ve been approached by two of their factories to this point, as well as two distributors. One of the factories has paid me for a consultation. This is a pretty impressive outfit; they are young, smart, eager, motivated, well funded, and focused. They showed me pictures of their facility: it’s impressively large. The factory floor is meticulously clean, and dotted with state-of-the-art computer-operated machinery that cranks out (they told me) 125,000 guitars a month. Wow. These are mostly $100 and $200 guitars, but (did I mention?) the market is huge and growing. And they are eager to start production of a limited number of handmade guitars that were better. That’s what they wanted to consult about.

A number of my colleagues already do business and/or consult with companies in China. They have contributed guitar and inlay designs, and have helped teach the Chinese workers how to make and assemble guitar parts.

SIDEBAR:

Speaking of a huge and growing market, I was listening to an interview on the radio recently, with an American developer of golf courses; he was selling golf courses to the Chinese. The interviewer commented that golf wasn’t really a Chinese game, so he wondered how much business this guy could do. He replied (quote): “well, essentially zero percent of the Chinese play golf, but zero percent of one-and-a-half billion is still a pretty good number”. No, I didn’t make that up.

THE GREATER ECONOMY

From what I’m seeing, it is looking as though China will be the dominant economy in the world in twenty or so years. The sheer sophistication and scale of the productive machinery that I’ve gotten a peek at is stunning: robotics, laser machinery, CNC automation, etc. And what isn’t automated is attended to by handwork carried out with the focus of a sweatshop on steroids; factory employees put in incredible hours to meet inflexible production quotas. The work ethic is unreal.

For the time being, as I said, China is only beginning to find out and learn about and appreciate handmade guitars. There is a lot of new money there and rich Chinese are happy to buy expensive American things. They’ve started with American cars; they are inching toward guitars. There is, as in the U.S., a rapidly developing 1%-vs.-the-99% of their very own, although, no one really talks about that. They just report Economic Growth statistics baldly, in terms of abstract things like market penetration . . . it all sounds evocative of the Wisdom of the Ancients, and just as hard to interpret or understand.

It is one thing to say things like “China is modernizing and growing at remarkable speed”. It is another to have some understanding of what that means.

SOME REALLY AWFUL STUFF; YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP THIS PART

The factory I cited above, that is cranking out 125,000 guitars a month, is one of the bigger and more sophisticatedly tooled up ones. But it is one of hundreds. Can you imagine the sheer amount of wood that is gobbled up in the making of these instruments? They’re mostly plywood, and they look very clean and pretty. But My God . . . that’s a lot of precious wood being turned into these things.

A LOT of wood.

I’ve recently become aware of two documentaries about current China that have had an impact on me. One is titled “Manufactured Landscapes” and the other is “Racing to Extinction”. They’re really horrible. One of them features the city of Guangzhou, which is a big city made up of factories and dormitories. There are factory complexes larger than football fields in which thousands of young Chinese men and women slave away at work stations, all day long, every day, assembling parts and pieces to all the electronic goods that we buy — from on-off switches to the equipment that will have those on-off switches. This is not skilled, meaningful work. It is capitalist piece-work. All of these products will sooner or later wind up in a Chinese, American, or European landfill. Actually, probably European or American; many Chinese factories are for export only. You can’t get what they produce, in China.

There are HUGEMONTAINS OF JUNK outside another city whose name I can’t pronounce — very largely electronic waste, but really including everything made of plastic and metal and glass, that has been shipped to China from the U.S., and probably Europe. China is one of our dump sites, and has been for a while. Africa has been another. And I’m not kidding about the mountains; they’re unbelievable in size; all the millions of computers and electronic stuff we get rid of every year wind up there. They’re made to not be fixable, and we don’t have the capacity to absorb such amounts of recycled waste; the current watchword is N.I.M.B.Y.

Well, see, we don’t actually recycle it; we export it; the Chinese recycle it . . . badly and inefficiently and pollutingly. There is footage of Chinese people going through these mountains, looking for this or that to salvage, in very low-tech ways. Yet the scale of the waste from these efforts also staggers the imagination. The cities near these mountains of junk look like recycling yards themselves. There is junk piled up everywhere; in the streets; in the yards; in the fields; in the houses. None of it is under a roof or other cover; it’s all out in the open.

I hope this letter finds you all well. I’m doing o.k. in spite of (and along with) my various medical adventures. I sort of think that I’m in better shape than a lot of the rest of this country, actually. But let’s not get into that.

Things in my life are progressing . . . slowly. My life is becoming interestingly complicated. For starters, have too much work to do; I simply don’t have time to do it all — unless people are willing to wait longer to get guitars from me. I’m getting more commissions now that I’m old and famous and decrepit; I guess people are thinking to order their guitars before it’s too late. As I have more projects than I can cope with, I’ve hired (for the first time ever) a personal assistant to help me organize my priorities and my use of time.

With my new assistant’s help, I’ve organized my building efforts into building four guitars at a time. Each set of four takes me about five to six months to make.

Why does it take so long? Well, for one thing, it’s not at all the same as putting four sets of woods through the same paces and procedures and more or less cookie-cuttering four guitars to completion. I’m a custom maker, so each guitar will be different in some ways: different woods; individual treatment and thicknessing of woods; different rosettes; different models; different neck and fretboard measurements; different scale lengths; individually made and sized bridges; individual voicing for different target sound (the voicing on each guitar that I make takes me two days) ; different peghead veneers; individual intonation work; different ornamental touches and inlays; sometimes different finishes; different neck measurements; some guitars are cutaways or not; some guitars have fanned frets; some guitars have twelve strings; etc. Also, we make our bindings, head blocks, bracing, necks, etc. rather than to farm them out or subcontract them. Finally, some guitars are “special” projects and take forever. Four such sets of specs is the most that I can juggle around at any time. Anything more than that and I lose my focus.

Besides that, I’ve always worked slowly. I do an awful lot of the work by hand, with hand tools. I don’t cut corners. If I did, I’m sure I’d dilute the quality of my guitars. Worst of all, I’m artistic; that always takes time. I also teach, do repairs, and do administrative work (paperwork, endless emails and correspondence, record-keeping, finances, bookkeeping, and keeping track of the work flow) alongside of my building. I cannot separate or eliminate any of these activities. Plus, you probably know that I’ve written two books; well, I’m writing another two-volume set now. And I still go to guitar shows, which soak up a lot of time and energy.

And I receive visitors. This is increasing, for some interesting reasons, and it eats into my time; I’ll get back to this point later.

Finally, I have varying amounts of help at work, depending on how many apprentices I have at a given time. A year ago I had three; now I have one, and he’s on maternity leave as he just became a dad. I expect another apprentice to begin his studies with me this coming Summer. All in all, I have less help than usual these days.

HEALTH

My last health/mental-health report was of the aftermath of my heart’s having stopped pumping blood, and the installation of a pacemaker to keep a somewhat wonky muscle functioning regularly. (Well, it has worked hard for many years now and never took any time off, so I sort of understand that it might want a break.)

I got sick the month after I got my pacemaker, with a horrible bronchial infection that lasted three months. It’s been flu season (and a very bad one at that) so that may have been implicated. Also, the Santa Rosa fires occurred; they made the air foul as far as 90 miles away. That blaze was a clusterf**k of PG&E equipment breakdown, bad communication, lack of communication, and the state’s Emergency Warning System’s being asleep at the wheel; as a result several thousand homes burned to the ground. In any event, the air in Berkeley and Oakland was hazy and we could smell the soot. That didn’t help at all. For me, I think that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say.

THE NAMM TRADE SHOW

I got well just in time for the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) show. It’s the world’s largest trade show for the music business; it’s where manufacturers introduce all their new products and lines to the market. NAMM takes place in Anaheim every January. There’s nothing in Anaheim, really, except for this event and Disneyland – and the NAMM event is as loud and colorful as a Disneyland for musicians and musical merchants could get. If you’re in the music biz at any level (retailing, import-export, sheet music, guitars, kazoos, music magazine publishing, strings and accessories, violins, ukuleles, accordions, drums, recording equipment, wood supplies, specialty supplies, woodwinds, horns, microphones and amps and special effects electronics, tuners, stands and displays, straps, tambourines, music machines, harmonicas, pianos, basses, cellos, musical computer programs, musical gizmos of all kinds, etc. etc. etc. etc.) you will go, or send someone to, the NAMM show. People come from all over the U.S. and Europe, of course . . . and from as far away as Tokyo, Singapore, and Guangzhou . . . to see what’s new and to place wholesale orders for the following year. The convention facility itself is as large as an airport, and it’s for music biz people, retailers, and media only; the public is not allowed.

And why am I telling you this? Well, it has to do with the sheer size of the event, combined with the state of the music biz market . . . and my position in it. I’m visible and interviewable.

So, every January and into February, visitors visit me before and after NAMM.

This year I had visitors from Germany, China, Japan, Korea, Alaska, and mainland U.S. They come to visit, refresh the relationship, talk business . . . and to interview me. I gotta tellya, you’d be surprised at how many music magazines there are out there, and they’re all looking for things to feature and write about. There are even – for the first time – music magazines in China. Their music biz is opening up to non-Chinese rhythms, instruments, and merchandise at a rapid speed.

KOREA AND CHINA

I am beginning to be courted by guitar dealers and stores in Korea and China. I remember that thirty or so years ago my work was being discovered in Japan; it was an important period of interest, excitement, growth, expansion, recognition, etc. Of course, the Japanese market has grown, developed, and changed remarkably in that time, and contemporary guitar makers are now known and their work is accepted easily in the marketplace. Stores carry inventories of known luthiers’ work at prices that are commonly accepted. There are talented young Japanese luthiers now, whereas there were hardly any when this all started. There are also guitar shows and exhibitions and supporting media (books, music, magazines, YouTube and the internet, recorded music, etc.) which didn’t exist previously. There are also loads of guitar performers and music; and so on. An entire industry has grown around this.

In this time period the Japanese economy has shrunk, though. It had its huge spurt of postwar growth, but the bubble burst in the 1990s and it’s been struggling to maintain itself since.

Growth is just beginning in China and Korea, however. Their markets are like a giant that is beginning to wake up. There is excitement, confusion, ferment, activity, and opportunism. They have a class of recently-become-very-rich entrepreneurs who have benefited from their population growth and the migration of rural people to the cities where industry and tech will give them jobs . . . and the people who have been in the real estate biz have become very, very wealthy. The new middle class has disposable income and is looking to buy expensive and exotic American goods, starting with cars. American guitars, too, are so exotic that they sell for huge prices.

Some Chinese believe that these imported instruments are very, very, very, very special and good. Well, some of them really are. But in China there is no prior experience against which to form reliable opinions; I heard that a Santa Cruz guitar was recently sold there for $43,000. That’s ridiculous by our standards, because they normally sell for a fraction of that amount. With all due respect to Santa Cruz guitars.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

In this regard, it is a bit like the Dutch tulip-mania of the 17the century. Tulips were introduced to Europe in the 1550s from Turkey and blossomed into popularity in the 1590s as botanists noticed how well that flower thrived in those climates.

Interestingly, somehow, tulips got sucked into the world’s first recorded speculative bubble. In late 1636, at the height of tulipmania, prices rose to extraordinarily high levels and a single bulb could sell for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsworker! [Rich] people were going crazy for these things. The bubble burst in February of 1637, investors were ruined, and tulips became affordable to the common man. [For more information, see Wikipedia.]

Historically, this mania and the money that was spent in it were made possible by two things.

The first was that the Dutch developed many of the techniques of modern finance. They created a market for tulip bulbs by making them into durable goods; one element of this was that the practice developed of buyers (in this case florists) signing contracts before a notary to buy goods (in this case tulips) at the end of the season, at a known and agreed-upon price. They thus were effectively creating and making futures contracts . . . as well as the phenomenon of short selling. Then, as tulips became popular in France and other countries, and there began to be real money to be made in this flower, speculators began to enter the market.

The second thing was the context for the first: the Dutch economy. Holland was a colonialist power (as well as a trading and exploring one), and its Dutch East India Company was at that time the most powerful economic entity in the world. It was creating a powerful national economy, as well as an economic aristocracy, by (among other things) draining the Indies of its resources. It did so in well-documented Robber Baron style. The Dutch East India Company actually became the de facto government of some of the countries and provinces it did business with. No, I’m not making that up.‘

O.K.; that’s it for this segment. Part 2 of this narrative is coming right up.

I have postponed my voicing classes, for an as-yet-undefined period of time. This will be a disappointment to a good handful of people, but I see no other alternative at this point, given other factors in my life.

For some years now my classes have been far from full. I’ve had quite a few classes with only two or three students. I had one with four. But I really want to have six. That is a much better arrangement from the standpoint of interactions, question-and-answer sessions, problem-solving, looking-over-the-next-person’s-shoulder as we do the hands-on exercises, and the sharing of views and opinions.

The problem has not so much been the cost as it has been the inconveniences of scheduling. Different people can only come during certain months or times of the year, but not others. And I cannot offer the class several times a year. But whatever the cause, the result is that the classes are a net loss for me at a time when I cannot take such efforts on.

Another part of this mix is I’ve gotten very busy with guitars to make, and am so far behind schedule that I cannot afford the time each class takes. It requires about a week of preparation beforehand, then the class is nine days long, and then it takes me a week to recover my energies. In the meantime, my students and I take over the shop and nothing else gets done. It really is costly in terms of time . . . not to mention the hour of weekly emailing and communication that must be dealt with between classes; over the course of a year that adds up to fifty hours at the computer. All in all, having classes that are only half full really works against me.

Good luck to you in your building efforts. The best advice I can give at this point is that, if you have not already done so, go out and buy a set of my books and read them. They are FULL of pertinent and useful information, and my class has been organized around the information contained in these books. You can read up on them on my website, and order from me directly or through my website; They cost $265 for the set, plus shipping, and I can autograph them for you if you wish. See below for more information.

Sincerely, Ervin Somogyi

P.S.: My two-volume book set has the titles The Responsive Guitar and Making the Responsive Guitar. The first is about the Why, the How Come, the What If, and the What’s That All About. Each of its chapters describes a part or component or function of the guitar, its dynamic importance and structural, how that aspect of the guitar works and interacts with other aspects, and how different builders work differently with these same variables, and what happens when one emphasizes one variable or function over another. Mainly, it is about what each part of the guitar is there for, and what relationship it stands in to the other parts. The second is about how to construct the instrument itself. These books are heavily cross-referenced and are more useful a set than as single volumes. Finally, if you are not going to buy my books, then the single most useful piece of advice I can offer you is to accept that most guitars are SIGNIFICANTLY overbuilt. If you lighten up on the construction, thickness of parts, etc. then you will make better guitars.

Speaking of the internal cues that signal “it’s all right; it’s done and you can stop now”, I am reminded once again to Donald Trump. He has a big mouth and constantly demonstrates that he lacks any sense of propriety or boundaries – even a sense that things might be precariously out of balance and dangerous. And he cannot stop himself; not now… or ever. He’s missing any sense of “it’s done; you can stop now” — which is, in everyday life, a person’s ordinary and necessary sense of closure and satisfaction in things large and small. Trump doesn’t have that self-regulating function.

Living life like that, carrying a nameless discomfort around day and night, year after year, without it ever reaching orgasm (release or closure), must be a living hell. It does go a long way toward explaining Trump’s chronic insomnia. And maybe his compulsive licentiousness. He lacks the capacity to feel satisfied, even with his own prior decisions— although they are decisions in only the most primitive and unreliable sense of that word. Clearly, when one gives such people power they become dangerous. And one wonders why that person’s supporters have allowed that to happen, and for what reasons.

On the other side of the divide, people who are technicians (as opposed to those who rely heavily on internal cues) use precisely those left-brain tools: they stop when they have met the explicit requirements of their job assignment or task. Are they “right” or “wrong” to do this? Neither. They’re just following a different brain-map and a more or less mechanical set of “assembly instructions”. If we were looking at two guitar makers operating out of these different mindsets then we could say that one would essentially be making a sculpture and would stop “when it was done”, while the other would be using the Numbered Instructions Model, and would stop when the instructions ended. If these individuals were painters then one would essentially be painting from a live model and the other would be painting by numbers — much like Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had been doing when he was managing the Viet-Nam war; he’d been head of General Motors before then and his idea of running the war was to run it exactly like he’d run General Motors.

In the half-brain version of the previously given example of Engaging With An Enemy, the resolutions to such a task are unsatisfactory indeed. If you needed to engage with the enemy and had only a calculating brain, you’d very probably make up your mind that only one result was acceptable and go for it without flexibility, re-evaluation, or room for new input. Ecce Robert MacNamara – as well as General William Westmoreland and, later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. If you had a Trumplike brain you would be announcing a new goal for the challenge every week and the troops in the field would be spinning their wheels until at the next election. The ineptness shown in these examples is breathtaking.

If these are silly examples they are also tragic ones, but they go to something that is equally basic to a certain kind of guitar making. For instance, my students have had a few breakthrough experiences in exploring this in their own guitar work. They’d ask me for an opinion of a bridge or rosette that they’d made… and perhaps be surprised that I was sort of lukewarm in my reception of it. We’d then sit down and discuss what I was seeing vs. what they were seeing — and what that was all about.

Those sessions never fail to be interesting: these individuals will have never yet been asked to sit down and simply look at something— and I do mean simply look at the thing, and think about it exactly as it is in the moment in and of and by itself, and how its various parts fit together, and how it fits into its own greater context, and certainly without anyone telling them what they should think about it.

They may have read books on how-to, or heard lectures about aesthetics, history of design, or concern with market value or the luthier who made a particular guitar, or had been made aware of other people’s pre-judgments and aesthetics (and unconsciously making these individuals into points of reference for how they should think about their own work)… but they had never been asked to think for themselves and have a sense of what they themselves really thought. I ask that one just look at something and get a sense of what it really is, and what one likes about it or dislikes about it, as it is at that moment… without me suggesting to them what they should think… and then talk to me about it.

About the political thing: it is clear to me that in that realm, too, people have never been allowed nor encouraged… to… uh… simply… think… for… themselves. But that is a great way to get in touch with a sense of whether “it’s done, I can relax now” or not.

Anyway, who knew that guitar making and politics were so intimately connected?